Q&A: The Universal Sign
The Universal Sign
Question
With God’s help,
Hello Rabbi. I don’t know how familiar the Rabbi is with the writings of Rabbi Kook, and I wanted to ask whether the Rabbi knows his book Resh Millin. Following up on that question: if the answer is yes, does Rabbi Kook in this work arrive at something like a formula for what Leibniz called the “universal sign,” that is, a universal symbolic language that would express ideas similarly to how geometry, for example, represents lines precisely?
Much appreciated.
Answer
I have some familiarity, but enough to say that there is a misunderstanding here. Rabbi Kook does not presume in this work to arrive at a universal language in that sense. After all, you can’t really understand even his own text with precision anyway (certainly much less so than some other normal text). So to use it as a universal language for understanding precisely all discourse in the world is ridiculous.